Marketing Automation for Small Business

Windfall is the only thing on this site you buy by the month. Everything else here is an engagement that ends. This one runs the repeating half of a marketing job and keeps running it: the posts, the email, the follow-up on an enquiry that went quiet, the review request after a job closes, and the report on the first of the month that says what any of it did. Setup is $3,500 once, then $600 to $1,500 a month.

Canadian agencies publishing rate cards quote $1,500 to $5,000 a month for a small business program and $5,000 to $15,000 for full service. A fractional marketing lead starts around $6,000 a month. This sits under all of it, because it is not an agency and there is no content calendar meeting to bill you for.

The one AI use that went backwards

Statistics Canada asked AI-using businesses which applications they run. Marketing automation came in at 19.8% in the second quarter of 2026, down from 23.1% a year earlier. Data analytics at 36.6%, text analytics at 34.5% and chatbots at 28.2% all sit above it. It is the only major category on that list that fell.

The survey does not say why, so what follows is my reading rather than a finding. Businesses turned on a tool that generated posts, published them, watched nothing happen, and turned it off again. The tool was never the missing part. What was missing was a reason for anybody to care about the post, and no model invents that for you.

So this does not start with a content calendar. The first two weeks are spent finding the three things your business knows that a competitor does not, taken from the work rather than from a brand workshop. Everything the system produces afterward is a restatement of one of those three. That is the part that is not automatable, which is why it is in the setup fee.

What runs every week

That is the whole list. It does not include buying ads, running a rebrand, or shooting video. If you want those you want an agency, and I will say so on the first call rather than after you have paid a setup fee.

What drives the monthly number

The fourth row is the one that surprises people. If nothing in your business reliably knows that a customer enquired, half of this cannot run at all. Fixing that is workflow automation rather than marketing, it is a one-off cost, and it usually comes to less than a year of the monthly fee.

Nothing publishes without a person

Every outbound item waits for approval by default. Not because the drafts are bad, but because your name is on them, and a wrong price or a promise you cannot keep costs more than a quiet week. You can switch individual jobs to automatic once you have watched them for a month. Most clients do that with review requests and follow-ups, and never do it with posts.

The rule that governs every build here applies to this one too: automation moves data and applies rules, and where judgement is needed it drafts and a person approves. A system that publishes in your voice while you sleep is a system you have to check every morning, which is not less work. The same reasoning decides what an intake agent is allowed to say.

When I will tell you not to buy this

• When the website does not turn visitors into enquiries. More traffic into a page that does not convert is a more expensive version of the same problem.
• When you cannot handle the enquiries you already get. Fix answering first, with an after-hours intake agent or with a person, then turn the tap on.
• When you cannot say which of your services makes the money. That is a counting problem, and the $999 assessment answers it for less than two months of this.
• When you are booked solid for the next six months. Marketing a business that cannot take the work buys you a waiting list and a reputation for not calling back.
• When the channel you want is one your customers do not use. I will build what you ask for, but the report will keep saying zero and we will both find that tiring.

The comparison that matters is not this against an agency. It is this against a part-time marketing hire, and that arithmetic is worked through in the note on AI against hiring another employee.

What you own

• Every account in your name, on your card. The scheduler, the email platform, the model provider. If you stop paying me the system keeps running and somebody else can take it over.
• The written prompt set and the rules, in plain language, so what the system believes about your business is a document you can edit rather than a black box you have to trust.
• Your list, your posts and your reporting history, exportable at any time without asking.
• A runbook naming every credential, every trigger and every failure mode.
• Three months minimum, then month to month. No annual contract, because a service you have to be locked into is a service that is not working.

The three month minimum exists because nothing here reports honestly before then. One month of data tells you the weather rather than the climate. I would rather you cancel in month four on real numbers than renew in month twelve out of habit.